July's People Read Online Free PDF

salvaged from wrecked cars, plates of crumbling tin, mud bricks; the hut where the farming implements were kept—these were the objectives and daily landmarks available. She moved between them neither working as others did nor able to do nothing as others did. She did have one book—a thick paperback snatched up in passing, until that moment something bought years ago and never read, perhaps it was meant for this kind of situation: Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi , in translation as The Betrothed. She did not want to begin it because what would happen when she had read it? There was no other. Then she overcame the taboo (if she did not read, they would find a solution soon; if she did read the book, they would still be here when it was finished). She dragged the lame stool July had supplied ‘for the children’ out where she had a view of the bush and began. But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness; it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone’s breath fills a balloon’s shape. She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination.
    They had nothing.
    In their houses, there was nothing. At first. You had to stay in the dark of the hut a long while to make out what was on the walls. In the wife’s hut a wavy pattern of broad white and ochre bands. In others—she did not know whether or not she was welcome where they dipped in and out all day from dark to light like swallows—she caught a glimpse of a single painted circle, an eye or target, as she saw it. In one dwelling where she was invited to enter there was the tail of an animal and a rodent skull, dried gut, dangling from the thatch. Commonly there were very small mirrors snapping at the stray beams of light like hungry fish rising. They reflected nothing. An impression—sensation—of seeing something intricately banal, manufactured, replicated, made her turn as if someone had spoken to her from back there. It was in the hut where the yokes and traces for the plough-oxen were. She went inside again and discovered insignia, like war medals, nailed just to the left of the dark doorway. The enamel emblem’s red cross was foxed and pitted with damp, bonded with dirt to the mud and dung plaster that was slowly incorporating it. The engraved lettering on the brass arm-plaque had filled with rust. The one was a medallion of the kind presented to black miners who pass a First Aid exam on how to treat injuries likely to occur underground, the other was a black miner’s badge of rank, the highest open to him. Someone from the mines; someone had gone to the gold mines and come home with these trophies. Or they had been sent home; and where was the owner? No one lived in this hut. But someone had; had had possessions, his treasures displayed. Had gone away, or died—was forgotten or was commemorated by the evidence of these objects left, or placed, in the hut. Mine workers had been coming from out of these places for a long, long time, almost as long as the mines had existed. She read the brass arm-plaque: BOSS BOY .
    The shift boss’s gang earn recognition and advancement. He is proud of his BOSS BOY ; some among the succession of incumbents have been recruited again and again from the kraals, the huts, repeating the migrant worker’s nine-or eighteen-month contract for the whole period of My Jim’s own working life; on Western Areas, while his girls are growing up ambitious to be ballet dancers.
    A white schoolgirl is coming across the intersection where the shops are, chewing gum and moving to the tune of summer-afternoon humming. In step beside her is a woman of the age blacks retain between youth and the time when their sturdy and comfortable breasts and backsides become leaden weight, their good